Prof John Mearsheimer attacked: from the Right!

I know that I've posted on Mearsheimer before, but this article is impossible to resist. I'm not sure now where I got it from (I followed a link from elsewhere), but this is a wonderful attack on Prof John Mearsheimer from the right, and from within his own university at that. Talk about the biter bitten! The official organ of the University of Chicago conservatives really, and very articulately, takes Mearsheimer to task. It's not clear (and there are few internal clues, but someone out there may know) whether this is a student or a faculty publication. I suspect the latter, as faculty would be able, if they felt this strongly, to find a wider, mainstream, outlet for their views. Whichever category it is, the writer attacks Mearsheimer on academic, not polemical or ideological, grounds. Note this opening paragraph: "When, after a long career built on a theory that domestic political relationships had a minimal impact on any state’s foreign policy, John Mearsheimer co-wrote The Israel Lobby, a popular book alleging the maximal impact of a small cabal on American foreign policy, we were perplexed at the incoherence. When the book was written without accompanying scholarship on the Turkish lobby which has had a hand in the failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide or push for a Kurdish state, the Irish lobby which greatly influenced the American policy in Northern Ireland for decades, or Arab, Chinese, Tibetan, Greek, Indian, or Pakistani lobbies that have all made their mark on American foreign policy, we were left wondering at the motives of his focus. When the book was finally read and its narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict rested on shoddy history, a mix of long-ago refuted facts (whose falsehood was easily available over Google) and stark errors of omission, we began to question the animus of Professor Mearsheimer."

My apologies for such a long quote (but it is a long and well argued article), but this opening sets the tone for the subsequent argument. As noted, the authors then set about the current reputation of someone they consider a formerly distinguished scholar with panache. Not only do they question his scholarship, as indicated by the quote above, they also attack his association with the self-confessed anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon. They do this through extensive quotes from Atzmon's book "The Wandering Who", alongside Mearsheimer's endorsement of the book, noting that defending Atzmon's free speech right to publish (even stronger in the USA than in many other liberal democracies) does not excuse this endorsement. Has, they wonder, he actually read the tome? If he has, how can he defend it (there is no evidence that Mearsheimer is actually antisemitic), and if not, how can he endorse the book? Their conclusion is damning: "If Professor Mearsheimer is to retain any of the grace of an accomplished scholar and do right by his home for nearly thirty years, there is but a single option: retirement." As a Brit, I could, however, wish that Atzmon wasn't also, officially, one as well.
Read the whole article here.

By Brian Goldfarb.